The Great perth Twitch - Part 3

November 2018

Greetings from Carnarvon! I’m currently all tucked up in bed after a huge day of birding, travelling and good fun! So time for a quick re-cap! Earlier this morning, Sue and I were up at 7.00am and arriving back at Lake Joondalup at 7.30am. We only had a few hours before we would be heading north with Steve Reynolds to twitch the Purple Heron, so that means this was our final effort to secure the Oriental Honey Buzzard for Sue’s Australian list!

This time we had the immense pleasure of birding with Daniel Mantle, the local expert on this species. He is currently writing up a detailed paper on the comings and goings, history and a detailed summary on everything we knew and had learned about the Oriental Honey Buzzard and their history here at Lake Joondalup and Perth. With an extra pair of eyes and scope, we felt like that perhaps today we would have a better chance.

Over the next few hours we watched many wonderful birds such as Square-tailed Kite, Australian Hobby, Whistling Kite and Little Eagle (Little Eagle pair consists of both a dark and a light morph) all soar by, but so far, no Oriental Honey Buzzard. Then right on 9.00am, I spotted a pair of birds moving just above the distant tree line. I signalled to Dan and we had the scope on them. Boom! It was the Oriental Honey Buzzard! Priority one was to ensure Sue got onto them, and Dan was more than happy to lower his scope a few feet for Sue to get a good peak through. Yes! She had them! That was tick 814 for Sue, what a superb and incredible effort!

For birders wanting to twitch this species, head to Lake Joondalup and park in the car park located off Lakeside Drive, close to the intersection at Aldgate Street. Once here, walk down to the open grassy area and look northwards for raptors rising from 8.00am onwards. The GPS co-ordinates are:31°43'53.7"S 115°46'27.7"E

Oriental Honey Buzzard

Oriental Honey Buzzard

As the minutes roared by, we watched as the Buzzards soared, circled and dipped over the trees, eventually turning SW and heading straight towards us. Within a few minutes, to all of our astonishment, the birds flew directly overhead, barely twenty metres above us. We had outstanding, unequalled views and suffice to say, Sue and I were very happy. Dan went as far to say that out his 50+ views of these birds, this was in his top 5. Not bad, not bad at all.

During our time at the Honey Buzzard site, we were joined by local birder and tour guide Wayne Merritt. With three hours to kill until we would be meeting Steve Reynolds, he was kind enough to offer to take Sue and I on a bit of tour around Lake Joondalup to see what we could find. We had a great time exploring around the lake, spotting a number of bush birds including Splendid Fairywren, Grey Fantail, Striated Pardalote, Western Gerygone, Little Corella and Sacred Kingfisher.

Laughing Kookaburra (immature, note the shorter bill)

Blue-billed Duck (adult male)

​Jumping in Wayne’s car, we headed round to the southern end where we heaps of great waterbirds including Blue-billed Duck, Australasian Grebe, Little Black Cormorant, Eurasian Coot and Australian Reed Warbler. It was an amazing time to be in the South West of WA with so many birds breeding and producing little companies of fluffy offspring.

In the final section we had time to visit, we focussed on bush birds, tracking down Weebill, Mistletoebird, and the local race of the White-browed (Spotted) Scrubwren. By the end of our visit, we had totalled up over 60 species from Lake Joondalup with our target species all wrapped up!

After a great morning of birding, we met Steve Reynolds back at our hotel, and finally hit the road towards Carnarvon. It’s an 8, almost 9-hour drive from Perth, so we were planning to arrive a few hours after dark. We knew our time was limited, but a rarity such as Purple Heron is just to good to miss! Surprisingly, barely any of the typical members of the twitching community had run up to chase this bird. However, our trio was not deterred and were ready to put in the hard yards for this true mega.

Grey Fantail

White-browed (Spotted) Scrubwren

Despite the length of the trip, the hours seemed to fly by. After a few hours we took a brief stop in Geraldton where we added Yellow-throated Miner to the trip list. For some reason this is a species I've never seemed to be able to get a great photograph of. Determined to rectify this, I grabbed my camera as Steve refuelled the car. As Sue watched on, the Yellow-throated Miner took one look and bombed me! Long story short, good photos of this species are still pending. Still thinking that I had an outside possibility of Roseate Tern, we visited the beach looking for the local tern roost but only succeeded in adding Eastern Osprey to trip list.

After a quick fuel up and bite to eat, it was time for the final stretch. We had the enormous pleasure of watching the sky melt from sky blue, to sunburnt orange, etched with shimmering pinks and reds.

Mulga Snake - Pseudechis australis

South-western Spiny-tailed Gecko - Strophurus spinigerus

​Once the sun was down, we enjoyed a couple of nocturnal specialties including a Spotted Nightjar that rocketed across the road ahead of us and a whooping 2 metre long Mulga Snake (often referred to as a King Brown Snake) that allowed for beautiful photography opportunities. We rolled into a very quiet Carnarvon at 9.40pm, picking up a gorgeous South-western Spiny-tailed Gecko on the main road. Bed was soon after, as we planned to be up at 5.00am ready to track down the mega Purple Heron.

James Mustafa is a birder, wildlife enthusiast and self-confessed twitcher from Melbourne, Australia. A musician and composer by trade, he has been birding, exploring nature and appreciate wildlife for all his life. Since taking up a real fascination with birds, he has soared with tropicbirds in the Indian Ocean, played with hummingbirds in North America, chased owls in Asia, and twitched everything from gulls to leaf warblers across Australia.